January 30, 2012

Who wrote Obama’s statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day?

On January 27th, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, President Obama issued a “written statement” which was reported by the press. You can be sure that he didn’t write this statement himself. Not after he goofed when he said this in a speech in May 2008:

“I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps,” Obama said, slowly and methodically. “And the story in my family is that when he came home, he just went into the attic, and he didn’t leave the house for six months. Alright? Now, obviously something had affected him deeply, but at the time, there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

Did whoever wrote Obama’s Remembrance Day statement get it right this time? This is a quote from Obama’s statement on January 27, 2012:

“We commit ourselves to keeping their memories alive not only in our thoughts, but through our actions,” Obama said in a written statement.

“As we remember all those who perished in camps from Auschwitz to Treblinka, Dachau to Sobibor, we pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.”

I would not have put Dachau in the same sentence as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. Dachau was not a death camp, although thousands “perished” there from typhus. The other three were death camps where Jews were gassed.

Even Auschwitz doesn’t belong in the same list as Treblinka and Sobibor. Auschwitz was a large complex consisting of three separate camps; it was a transit camp and a labor camp, as well as a death camp. Since this sentence seems to be directed at “those who deny the Holocaust,” the author should have named Belzec instead of Dachau. Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec were strictly extermination camps where Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival, while Dachau was mainly a camp for political prisoners.

Charles T. Payne, who helped to liberate Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was Barak Obama’s great uncle, the brother of his maternal grandmother. Charles T. Payne was a member of Company K, 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division. According to an Associated Press story, published on June 4, 2009, Charles T. Payne’s unit arrived at the Ohrdruf camp on April 6, 1945. Ohrdruf was discovered by American soldiers on April 4, 1945. The camp had been abandoned on April 2nd.

Why is all this important? In his written statement, Obama said “we pledge to speak truth to those who deny the Holocaust.” In speaking the truth to Holocaust deniers, one must pay attention to details. Holocaustians regard any tiny detail that deviates from their official story as “Holocaust denial.” When someone lumps together Dachau, Treblinka and Sobibor, this borders on “Holocaust denial.”

Dr. Deborah Lipstadt famously wrote in Denying the Holocaust that there is no “other side” when discussing the Holocaust. There is the official version, which is protected by law in at least 16 countries, and that’s it. Anyone who tries to present the “other side” is a criminal, as far as the Holocaustians are concerned. In view of this, President Obama should not have mentioned “those who deny the Holocaust.” It was a big mistake for him to acknowledge that there are people who believe in the “other side” of Holocaust history.

Yesterday, Hillary Rodham Clinton issued her statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day. This quote is from her statement:

This past year, we have seen Holocaust denial increasing throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and the Middle East. There has been an upsurge in anti-Semitic acts, including hateful graffiti, cemetery desecrations, verbal and physical assaults on Jews, incitement to anti-Semitic violence, and cartoons demonizing Jews.

Denying the truth of the Holocaust is an insult to history. We urge governments, civil society leaders, clerics, human rights groups, and all people of conscience in all nations to speak out against this kind of hatred. The United States will work with all of those who are committed to a world free of anti-Semitism and all other forms of ethnic or religious intolerance.

Her statement puts heavy emphasis on Holocaust denial. Big mistake — in my humble opinion. She should have accentuated the positive, instead of bringing up the negative. Maybe a reference to the Nuremberg IMT, which provides irrefutable proof of the Holocaust, or some mention of the new discovery of mass graves at Treblinka, would have been better.

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Mr. Payne is not an alleged liberator of Ohrdruf. Every member of the 89th is considered as a liberator of this camp. Despite the attempts be certain interest groups to prove otherwise, the 89th Infantry Division website was able to prove he was a member of the 355th.

You are correct that the 89th Infantry Division is officially credited with being “liberators” of Ohrdruf. I have made a correction on my blog post and added that the Ohrdruf camp was abandoned on April 2nd. The USHMM has an “offical” list of the divisions which “liberated” the camps. To be a liberator, a soldier must have been present within two days of the first soldiers to enter the camp. By that definition, Charles T. Payne was a “liberator” of Ohrdruf. However, there was nothing to “liberate” on April 6, 1945. The camp had been abandoned on April 2, 1945 and all the prisoners, except for a few that were too sick to walk, had been marched out of the camp and taken to the main camp (Buchenwald).

The American “liberators” viewed the “atrocities” which consisted of around 40 bodies in a shed, and the remains of bodies that had been burned on railroad tracks. These were bodies of prisoners that had died of typhus. The only real “atrocity” was the bodies of prisoners found lying on the ground near the entrance to the camp. The sick prisoners had been taken out of the camp by trucks. The “official story” is that these prisoners were shot by the SS men as they left the camp because there were not enough trucks to take these prisoners. However, the condition and the placement of the bodies indicates that these prisoners were killed by some of the other prisoners. After Eisenhower and the other generals left the camp, one of the prisoners who had shown them around was killed by the other prisoners. This proves that there was some animosity between the prisoners. There was also the body of a dead SS man near the entrance to the camp.

I checked out the website in the link on your name. The website has a quote from Rabbi Murray Kohn near the top. I have the same quote on this page of my website: http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/index.html On my website, I quoted quite a bit more from the speech made by Rabbi Kohn years after the camp was liberated. I also wrote on my website that Rabbi Kohn was 16 years old when he was at Ohrdruf. He had previously been at Auschwitz and had been evacuated to Buchenwald, then sent to the Ohrdruf sub-camp. He was one of the prisoners that was marched out of the Ohrdruf camp on April 2nd. At the age of 16, he might have thought that the SS men were killing the prisoners as fast as they could because the war was ending, but I also included this information on my website:

Begin quote:
Five years after seeing the Ohrdruf camp, General Bradley recalled that “The smell of death overwhelmed us even before we passed through the stockade. More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been flung into shallow graves. Others lay in the streets where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.” The presence of lice in the camp indicates that there was probably an epidemic of typhus, which is spread by lice.
End Quote

On this page of my website http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Ohrdruf/index.html I have a photo of the bodies found near the gate at Ohrdruf. The photo shows that the bodies have been covered with blankets because the pants worn by the prisoners had been pulled down. This indicates that these prisoners were killed by the other prisoners, not by the SS men because they ran out of trucks to transport the sick prisoners.

That’s a good example of holocaust believer’s lies — their “denial” of the truth. When they say there was a gas chamber at Dachau, or they call Dachau a death camp, they are denying the true facts of the “Holocaust.” Why aren’t these people shunned and called names? Believers can make any kind of errors they want, nobody gets excited about it.

What other U.S. presidents have made such a fuss over Holocaust? It makes me ashamed to see this bowing and scraping. Soon we will be paying reparations to Jews for not taking them in as refugees before the end of the war. Oh, I forgot, we ARE paying reparations to Israel in the hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

I don’t know how you can speak of Obama in even a mildly respectful way. Does he respect us?

Every president has commented on the Holocaust ever since it happened. You are the liar. Every time you deny, diminish or discount the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their followers you lie. The Nazis and their sympathizers were a disgrace to humanity. People who excuse, deflect and parse the Nazis’ actions are also a disgrace to humanity. They force family and friends to privately apologize for them to others and make their children especially glad to be away from them. When they die they leave a legacy marred by their own willful stupidity to believe, or say they believe, that one of the worst, most documented and forensically proven atrocities in the 20th century hadn’t happened. Make your peace with God, as anyone should who isn’t a perfect fool. It is far later than you think.

In what way did Truman comment on the holocaust? How about Pres. Eisenhower? What did John Kennedy say? There was no “commemoration” in those days. Your knowledge of American history is no doubt zero because you’re not even an American. You are someone who thinks “religiously” about history, not historically. Take your brainwashed mentality somewhere else if you can’t make an intelligent comment.

I think they like to push Dachau because of its location, near a major European city. Plenty of tourists visit there, and the gas chamber is still passed of as genuine, according to my cousin who visits the Oktoberfest almost every year.

You have made a good point. Dachau is near Munich which is very Americanized. There is a tourist office for Americans in the Munich Bahnhof, which is very popular; this is where Americans can arrange a tour to Dachau, even if they know nothing about Germany and can’t speak German. Also, Dachau is more well known than the other places that Obama mentioned. Maybe Dachau was included because it is the most recognizable of the Holocaust places. I never thought of that.